User:Walrasiad/Henry

Background

The documented details of Henry's life and career are few and far between. The principal source is the royal chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara, notably his Chronica de el-rei D. João I (1450) (covering the Ceuta expedition of 1415) and his Crónica dos feitos da Guiné (1453) (covering the discoveries, from 1434 to 1447), both written during Henry's lifetime. Openly hagiographic of Henry, commissioned by Henry and principally dependent on Henry's own recollection, the reliability of Zurara's chronicles is considered suspect by modern historians. Nonetheless Zurara remains the principal source behind modern conceptions of the career and legend of Henry the Navigator.

Zurara winds up his account around 1448. For the latter part of Henry's life, historians have had to rely upon the memoirs of two Henrican captains - a valuable eyewitness account by Alvise Cadamosto (written 1460s) and a less reliable one by Diogo Gomes (written c.1490s). However, the Henrican captains only really begin their story in 1455, thereby leaving an unfortunately large gap of several years from where Zurara left off.

After his death, numerous rumors, stories and legends sprouted about Henry. Although modern historians have strongly doubted their veracity, they continue to form part of the modern popular image of the prince. As archival material is practically non-existent, disentangling fact from fiction has been a continuing task for modern historians, subject to frequent disputes and revisions.

Early life

Henry was the third son of King John I of Portugal and his consort Philippa of Lancaster (the sister of King Henry IV of England). Henry was born in 1394 in Porto, probably when the royal couple was living in the city's old mint, now called Casa do Infante (Prince's House).

Henry and his brothers Edward of Portugal (future king),Peter of Coimbra (future regent), John of Reguengos (future constable) and Ferdinand the Saint Prince (future saint),constitute what Portuguese historians have traditionally labelled the 'illustrious generation' (Ínclita Geração). Some historians add his sister Isabella (future duchess of Burgundy) and half-brother Afonso of Barcelos (future duke of Braganza) to this list.

Next to nothing is known of his childhood. In 1408, when Henry was fourteen, his father John I extracted from the Portuguese Cortes a subsidy to help set up princely households for his sons. In 1411, John managed to cobble together enough lands around the town of Viseu to grant Henry his first lordship (senhorio).

Ceuta

In his first chronicle, Gomes Eanes de Zurara relates that the young prince Henry had a instigating role in in the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta in 1415. According to Zurara, Henry and his brothers, after a particularly energetic tournament, resolved to ask their father to knight them. But they were intercepted by the king's treasurer, João Afonso de Alenquer, who told them that knights ought to be armed only for heroic acts of valor in real battlefields, not for leisurely games. The project to conquer Ceuta was consequently devised by Alenquer and the princes for the purpose of "earning their spurs" and pressed upon the reluctant king John I of Portugal. Zurara tells us young Henry himself delivered the rousing speech that persuaded a skeptical assembly of Portuguese nobles and burghers to endorse the expedition.

Modern historians have largely discarded Zurara's story as a charming but probably fanciful tale, that more careful and weightier considerations were involved in John I's decision to capture and hold Ceuta. Nonetheless, Henry and his brothers certainly participated in the Battle of Ceuta (1415), and Henry seems to have had an organizing role in assembling the part of the conquest fleet that set out from Porto.. In the aftermath of the battle, Henry and his brothers were knighted by their father in the re-consecrated mosque of Ceuta, with arming swords supplied by their dying mother, Philippa of Lancaster. For his knightly motto, Henry chose the Anglo-Norman phrase talant de bien fere (trans. 'hunger for worthy deeds').

Coat of Arms of Prince Henry the Navigator, first Duke of Viseu.

In February 1416, John I invested Henry as the first Duke of Viseu (first ducal title created in Portugal) and Lord of Covilhã. The same month, John I placed Henry in charge of provisioning and administering Ceuta. Command of the Ceuta garrison itself was given by John I to Pedro de Menezes, Count of Vila Real. Although the partition of authority between Henry and Pedro de Menezes was not always clear, they seem to have gotten along well with each other (and, in the course of years, the count lent substantial sums of money to the perenially-indebted prince). The logistics of supplying the city were handled through a newly-established royal warehouse in Lisbon, the Casa de Ceuta, overseen by Henry.

Although Ceuta was immediately blockaded and its trade cut-off from the Moroccan side, it was only in August 1418 (sometimes dated 1419), after a long delay, that the Marinid sultan Abu Said Uthman III finally organized a Morocan army to recover the city. In this, the Marinids were assisted by the navy of the Nasrid Emirate of Granada. Hearing of the siege of Ceuta, John I rushed a fleet under the joint command of Prince Henry and his younger brother John of Reguengos to relieve the city. However, before Henry's fleet arrived, the Portuguese garrison commander Pedro de Menezes sortied and successfully forced the Marinid-Granadan armies to lift the siege. Having missed the main show, Henry came up with the idea of leading the fleet across the straits to seize Granadan-owned Gibraltar. But hearing of his impetuous son's intentions, King John I rushed emissaries to Ceuta to forbid it (Gibraltar, once owned by Crown of Castile, was in the Castilian 'sphere of conquest') and ordered his sons back to Portgal.

Around 1420, shortly after his return from the Ceuta siege, Henry moved his residence to the Algarve, a closer perch to better help support the garrison in Ceuta.

Motives for Expeditions

It is uncertain when Henry began sending expeditions down the North African coast. According to some sources, Portuguese ships were sent out as early as 1415 or even 1412. It is probable some ships were sent out as naval patrols for reconnaissance and to bottle up corsair ports on the Moroccan coast in the lead up to Ceuta, but there is little reason to presume young Henry's participation at that stage. It is likely Henry took a determining role in the naval patrols along the Moroccan coast only after 1416, when he was saddled with the responsibility for the maintenance of Ceuta or after 1418/19, when he moved to the Algarve.

It is worthwhile emphasizing that Henry was not in charge of the Portuguese navy, as is sometimes popularly alleged. During the Henrican era, the Kingdom of Portugal had two naval chiefs - the admiral of the royal galleys (almirante-mor) and the admiral of the sail fleet (capitão-mor da frota). Neither of these positions was ever held by Henry. Rather, Henry's ships were either his own, financed out of his own resources and manned by servants of his own household, or private ships organized and paid for by private entrepreneurs, armed only with a license from Henry.

At this early stage, Henry's own resources were still meager. Henry's earliest naval patrols were probably little more than established Portuguese pirates harassing the Moroccan coast with a privateering license issued by Henry.

Cross of the Order of Christ

In May 1420, John I secured from Pope Martin V the appointment of Henry as the new master of the Order of Christ,, a Portuguese military order founded in 1319 from the defunct Templar knights. (more precisely, 'lay administrator' of the Order of Christ rather than 'master' strictly speaking, as Henry never formally took up the monastic vows to make himself a knight of the Order.) As the old reconquista-era charter of the Templars-turned-Christ knights specified their obligation to campaign against "the Moors", Henry believed he could tap the Order's substantial human and material resources for naval patrols on the Moroccan coast. (This was not easy, as the knights insisted their charter did not oblige them to serve outside of the Iberian peninsula; Henry had to secure special papal bulls to that end..)

In 1420, a palace coup in Fez unleashed a struggle for succession and the breakdown of order within the Marinid kingdom. As Morocco sorted itself out internally, pressure on Portuguese-held Ceuta was released, leaving Henry with little to do. The lull in Ceuta diminished the immediate urgency of the coastal patrols, and allowed Henry to redefine their objectives more widely. It is uncertain when the expeditions morphed from patrolling to exploring, or what exact objectives Henry had in mind. Chroniclers and historians have speculated endlessly about his likely motivations. The chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara proposed five reasons motivating Henry's expeditions:

• 1. idle curiosity, a desire to know what lay beyond the limits. Since ancient times, mariners had generally refused to sail below Cabo Não (Cape Non) - not because it was a particularly difficult headland, but rather because it marked the beginning of the Sahara desert, and the coast thereafter was largely bereft of human settlements and thus of little interest (and should a ship get in trouble or be wrecked, dangerously lacking local provisions). Thus the old ditty, Quem passar o Cabo de Não, ou tornará ou não ("He who passes Cape Non, will turn or not return").. Cape Non had been surpassed already in the 14th C. by Genoese, Majorcan and Catalan sailors (e.g. the Vivaldi brothers, Jaume Ferrer) and points south of it were already indicated on several maps (e.g. the Dulcert map of 1339, the Catalan Atlas of 1375). It was around then that Cape Bojador was defined as the next limit, the non plus ultra of navigation, beyond which it was not safe to sail. Henry was simply curious to know what lay beyond that.

African Saracen king with a gold nugget (thought to be Mansa Musa of the Mali Empire), in the 1375 Catalan Atlas

• 2. commercial profit, the prospect of finding new markets for trade. Personal enrichment loomed large as a motive of the Henry-era expeditions. Ceuta had been an end-point of the Trans-Saharan trade, and Henry doubtlessly heard about the gold mines of Songhai Gao and, more enticingly, of the existence of a "River of Gold" in sub-Saharan Africa, which was said to flow from the gold-producing Mali Empire into the Atlantic Ocean somewhere south of Cape Bojador. The "River of Gold" was probably the Senegal River (which reaches up to the Buré-Bambuk goldfields, and, at the time, was assumed to be conjoined to the Niger River into a single east-west river). The river was described by Medieval Arab historians, like al-Bakri and al-Idrisi, and speculatively depicted in 14th century European portolan charts, beginning with the Pizzigani brothers chart of 1367. It was believed that whomever found the mouth of the river could side-step the trans-Saharan route (which passed through Moroccan lands), and reach the African gold centers directly by sea, a highly profitable prospect. The Catalan Atlas of 1375 explicitly makes note that the Majorcan sailor Jaume Ferrer set out in 1346 down the west African coast precisely with the objective of finding the "Riu de l'Or". It is reported that, in 1402, the Castilian-Norman conquerors of the Canary islands prodded the African mainland for directions to the river. It is doubtless that Prince Henry set finding the "River of Gold" as one of the central objectives, if not the single purpose, of his early expeditions.

• 3. military reconnaissance, to determine the extent and power of Muslim Morocco in North Africa.

• 4. to find if there were any Christian kings south of Morocco that might be induced into a military alliance with Portugal. By this time, the lands of the legendary Christian king known as 'Prester John' were already identified as the Ethiopian Empire - the Pope, Venice and Aragon had already made contact with the Ethiopian emperor Zara Yaqob. However, the extent and power of Ethiopia's empire, or the existence of other similar Christian states below the Sahara, were still unknowns. This fired up the imagination of launching a two-front Christian attack on Muslim North Africa. Particularly enticing to Henry were reports of the existence of the Sinus Aethiopicus, a gulf somewhere south of Bojador, that was said to penetrate deeply into the African continent, as far east as the western borderlands of Ethiopia. If such a gulf existed, it would make the kingdom of Prester John accessible by a sea route (and avoid the complications of travelling through Muslim Egypt to reach it). This legend, the notion that the African coast did not extend straight south but took a sharp eastward bend, could be a hazy reference to the Gulf of Guinea, or just a lucky guess.

• 5. to spread the Christian faith. This is a little harder to discern. Although Henry's communications to the pope did not cease to emphasize the religious angle, it is difficult to see what concrete steps Henry took in that direction. With perhaps a couple of exceptions, he is not known to have dispatched any Christian missionaries or priests on his expeditions, with the objective of introducing Christianity on distant shores. Zurara's own exposition of Henry's religious mission is feeble - limited to defending the notion that capturing Muslims or Pagans in Africa to be sold as slaves in Christian Europe was a kind of "missionary" work. As historian Russell notes, "in Henryspeak, conversion and enslavement were interchangeable terms"

By contrast, the Henrican captain Diogo Gomes supplies one and only one reason for Henry's expeditions: money. Gomes says Henry's expeditions were driven by his search for gold and commerce so he could financially sustain his large entourage of squires and retainers.

(Over a century later, Damião de Góis (1566) would speculatively suggest that Henry was seeking the route to the Indies, driven by the tales of classical antiquity about Menelaus the Greek and Hanno the Carthaginian. Most historians have dismissed Góis's conjecture outright.)

The Atlantic Islands

The Madeira islands (top) and the Canary Islands (bottom) (from c.1780).

Henry was probably still in his naval patrol stage when, in 1419 (or 1418), two of Henry's squires, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, were blown off the Moroccan coast and stumbled on the island of Porto Santo. Returning the next year (1420), accompanied by a third captain, the Luso-Genoese knight Bartolomeu Perestrello, they discovered the larger nearby island of Madeira proper.

Although the Madeira archipelago was probably already known (they are depicted on earlier portolan maps), this is their official discovery date. As the name indicates, Madeira's main attraction was the prospective harvesting and export of hardwood timber, from the virgin laurisilva forests that thickly covered the island. However, unlike the Canary Islands, the Madeira islands were uninhabited - they would have to be populated before they'd begin to show a profit. It was probably this that drew Henry's attention towards slavery.

A potentially easy source of slaves at the time were the Guanches, the primeval native inhabitants of the Canary Islands to the south. However, the Canary Islands were long claimed by the crown of Castile, thus off-limits to Portugal. Nonetheless, the Castilian conquest, begun in 1402, facing fierce resistance from the Guanches, had recently ground to a halt. In 1418, having taken only three of the seven islands (Lanzarote, Fuerteventura and Hierro) the title-holder Jean de Béthencourt gave up the enterprise and, with the crown's permission, sold the Canaries off to some Castilian grandees. But neither they, nor anyone else in Castile, seemed particularly interested in mounting a new expedition to complete the conquest.

With Castile now apparently losing interest, Henry sensed he might get away with seizing at least the four unconquered islands. In 1424, Henry persuaded his father and the Portuguese navy to mount a large armed expedition, under the command of Henry's household governor D. Fernando de Castro, to seize the island of Gran Canaria. It was a fiasco. Castro's expeditionary force was repulsed on the beaches by the aboriginal Guanches. Castile lodged protest immediately.

The failure of the 1424 Canaries expedition forced the Portuguese to look to conventional means to populate the Madeira islands. Claiming Madeira as crown property, around 1425, King John I partitioned the islands into three donatary captaincies (capitanias), granted to their discoverers (not Henry): Zarco received Funchal (south Madeira), Teixeira received Machico (north Madeira) and Perestrello received Porto Santo Island. The donatary captains began colonizing the islands shortly after, many of the colonists coming from Henry's own seigneural lands, soon supplemented by convict exiles (degredados)

The Azores archipelago, from c.1584

In 1431, Frei Gonçalo Velho Cabral, a monk-knight of Henry's Order of Christ, discovered the Azores archipelago. Like Madeira, it is possible some of these islands might have been known before - in particular, a certain royal pilot 'Diogo de Silves' (name uncertain) may have come across them as recently as 1427 . But this is the official discovery date. Gonçalo Velho discovered only the Formigas in 1431, but would return the next year and discover Santa Maria Island as well. The rest of the archipelago would only be found in later decades.

After King John I's death in 1433, Henry's eldest brother ascended as King Edward of Portugal. In one of his first acts, Edward issued a royal letter formally granting Henry the island group of Madeira & Porto Santo, followed up by another letter granting Henry's Order of Christ exclusive spiritual jurisdiction over the islands (thus letting Henry reap the church tithes). That same month, Edward also granted Henry a monopoly on tuna fishing in the Algarve and the islands, and a monopoly on soap-making throughout the Kingdom of Portugal.

The initial 1433 Madeira grant was only a lifetime donation and required Henry to renew and respect the terms of the old 1425 captaincies of Zarco, Texeira and Peresetrello. (Edward revised Madeira into a hereditary grant in 1436, when Henry wrote out his will in favor of Edward's second son, Ferdinand). Bolstered by these grants, Henry took a more intensive effort to develop the Madeira islands, and turn them into a lucrative export-oriented enterprise - at first, timber harvesting, supplemented by dragon's blood (a valuable resin dye) and wine. In 1444, Henry extracted from the crown exemption of Madeira goods from customs duties in continental Portugal. Most significantly, it is Henry who is principally responsible for introducing sugar cane plantations on Madeira, drawing on Italian expertise from Sicily and Cyprus. By the mid-1450s, Madeira was already producing enough sugar to export in large volumes to the rest of Europe.

Past Bojador

Throughout the 1420s, Henry attentions seem to have been primarily focused on the Atlantic islands - Madeira, Azores, Canaries. But it seems Henry had also been sending ships yearly down the West African coast in an effort to get past the physical and psychological barrier of Cape Bojador.These yearly expeditions are rather poorly documented. Zurara reports that it took "twelve years" worth of expeditions before it finally succeeded;, a royal letter from 1443 recognizes that "fifteen attempts" were made before successfully passing Cape Bojador.

Cape Juby

Cape Bojador

A. Ruivos

A. Cavallos

Rio do Ouro

Pedra da Galé

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Portuguese exploration milestones 1434-36 in Western Sahara

Modern historians have debated whether the "Cape Bojador" so feared in Henry's time was indeed the headland currently identified by that name. Some speculate it was really Cape Juby further north, which seems to correspond more closely with the physical descriptions given by Zurara - low-lying, outlying reefs, fast currents. But Juby had been routinely surpassed by ships in the Canaries traffic by that time, so it seems unusual to make such a big fanfare about it. Some conclude that Henry merely 'clarified' a cartographic error, and did little more than show that the psychological barrier had already been surpassed.

However, 20th C. navigator Gago Coutinho insists that the psychological argument is overplayed, that there were real physical challenges at the real Cape Bojador that Henry needed to overcome. Coutinho admits that sailing past Cape Bojador wasn't in itself difficult - the difficulty lies in the return. Ships coming back from Bojador would be sailing directly against the northeasterly trade winds and the contrary Canary Current. While it is possible to painfully tack back along the coast against the wind, the variable strength of wind and currents makes the length of return time unpredictable. It might be sufficiently long that the ship will run out of fresh water or supplies while still out at sea, and the Sahara desert coast has little replenishment to offer.

Ocean currents (blue), prevailing winds (green) and probable navigation routes (red) of the Henrican era (as suggested by Gago Coutinho). The further south the ships sailed, the wider the return arc and thus the more open sea sailing required.

The trick to overcome this and shorten the return time is to sail back in an arc - the volta do mar largo ("turn of the open sea") - that is, strike northwest, away from the Moroccan coast and weave through the Canary islands until the 30°N latitude was reached, where the winds reversed themselves into westerlies that could carry the ships quickly back to Portugal. What made Cape Bojador difficult is that it was sufficiently south that a ship attempting the arc could not count on making visual contact with Canary island landmarks quickly enough and could be carried disoriented far out into the unknown ocean. By contrast, returning from Cape Juby was sufficiently within range of the Canaries to restore visual sight quickly.

The further south one sailed, the wider the return arc and the more open sea sailing one had to undertake. This prospect, Coutinho asserts, is what made Cape Bojador a real navigational barrier, and not merely a psychological one.

Coutinho asserts that to pass Bojador - or rather to return with reliability - Henry had to first solve several technical problems related to open sea sailing away from landmarks. Navigators must learn how to rely on geometry, the sun and the stars alone to determine the position of the ship. This, Gago Coutinho assures us, were real technical challenges, and that the efforts undertaken by Henry (and his team of cartographers, navigators, astronomers and engineers) to solve them were real accomplishments.

This lends credence to the reported time and effort it took to overcome Bojador. "Twelve years" or "fifteen expeditions" seem laughable if the obstacle was merely Cape Juby - a conversation with a Castilian sailor would have sufficed. But it is more understable if Henry was experimenting with open-sea sailing, gathering intelligence and tinkering with new instruments during this period. (It also helps explain why Gonçalo Velho Cabral suddenly turned up as far west as the Azores in 1431.)

The breakthrough was finally made in 1434 (or 1433), when Henry's squire Gil Eanes, aboard a single-mast barca finally sailed past Cape Bojador. This cleared the way for further exploration down the West African coast.

The very next year, 1435, Gil Eanes was sent out again, along with Henry's cup-bearer Afonso Gonçalves Baldaia (aboard a new ship, a barinel), and sailed as far as Angra dos Ruivos (Garnet Bay). In 1436, Baldaia set off again, this time by himself. On this trip, Baldaia discovered a coastal inlet, which he named Rio de Ouro (around modern Dakhla, Western Sahara), imagining it was the mouth of the legendary 'river of gold' spoken of by Trans-Saharan traders. Baldaia sailed on south, crossing the Tropic of Cancer, and reached as far as Pedra da Galé (Galha Point, a rock island off Cape Barbas), before turning back.

Despite the leap, the 1434-36 expeditions turned out to be disappointing. The stretch of coast sailed by Eanes and Baldaia was largely empty desert and they failed to make contact with a single living soul. They found evidence of humans - footprints, abandoned fishing nets, and a native party was spotted at a distance - but it was not very encouraging from a commercial vantage point, so Henry suspended the expeditions.

Henry and Sagres

Coutinho proposes Henry developed:

1. new intelligence (about the currents and winds out in the open ocean)
2. new ships (adapting existing ships for open sea sailing e.g. the caravel),
3. new instruments (e.g. the astrolabe and the nocturlabe),
4. new techniques (e.g. figuring out how to accurately correct for 'compass error', that is, the exact difference between the magnetic north and the true north, by recourse to the Pole Star),
5. new charts (e.g. proto-Mercator "planar" projection maps to correct for the bearing error of widening longitude as one approaches the equator).

Not all these difficulties would have been solved by the 1430s, and it is probable Henry continued to work on and improve them throughout his life. Unfortunately, Coutinho's hypotheses remain conjectural, as we have no accounts of the Henrican research nor any surviving nautical charts from that era, and the slight information we have on the expeditions do not reveal much about the instruments, techniques or routes.

Popular conceptions of Henry the Navigator tie him inextricably to Sagres Point, the ancient Sacrum Promontorium, a windswept headland on the southwest corner of Portugal, just below Cape Saint Vincent. It is believed that Henry resided there for much of his life, and turned it into an academy and research center for navigational science.

Villa do Infante

Cape St. Vincent, Sagres, Raposeira and Lagos (1797 map)

It is alleged that in 1420 (or thereabouts), shortly after his return from Ceuta, Henry the Navigator decided to begin erecting a residence at Sagres Point. However, modern historians believe his activity there only began later, after his return from the Tangier enterprise in 1437. In a royal letter (dated October 27, 1443), the regent Peter of Coimbra granted Henry a strip of land in Algarve, consisting of Cape Saint Vincent plus one league surrounding it, as a lifetime fief, with the express purpose of allowing Henry to populate a town (or towns) in the area. Whatever the exact start date, Henry began erecting his town, which he first called Terçanabal, and then later renamed Villa do Infante, on the Sagres promontory (although its exact site is a little uncertain)

Historians generally agree that the logistical center and launch point for the naval expeditions of the Henrican era was the port town of Lagos. Henry's original intention at Sagres was probably merely to establish a support station and observation point. But Henry's project grew in ambition. Some historians have argued Henry nurtured long-term plans to elevate Sagres into a major commercial entrepot, a center not only for his own expeditions, his Madeira and Arguin trade, but also to serve as a port of call for foreign commercial traffic going through the Straits of Gibraltar, notably the Italian Flanders galleys. The Sagres promontory forms a small protected semi-circular bay to its east, and was thus a natural shelter for ships waiting for favorable winds to pass the rough Cape Saint Vincent further north. Henry believed the idling ships would welcome the opportunity to engage in trade there. Agreements broached with the Republic of Genoa to set up a colony there, and the Republic of Venice to allow trade, hoping to gradually draw commerce away from (and maybe even eventually eclipse) ports like Ceuta and Cadiz.

However, lacking any existing structures, Henry would have to build the Sagres center from scratch. It would remain a construction project for the rest of Henry's life. During this period, Lagos continued to serve as the main port, and for at least some period of time, Henry took up residence at the small village of Raposeira, roughly half-way between Sagres and Lagos, thus able to supervise both the Lagos expeditions contruction of Sagres.

There was "a school, a port and a small fort", and according to Henry's will, a church and a chapel

, never amounting to much more than a fort and a few outlying houses. It was abandoned and fell into ruins after his death.

School of Sagres

In later years, legends arose that Henry had established at his villa in Sagres an astronomical observatory and a "school" or academy of some sort, wherein Henry assembled some of the leading astronomers, cartographers, instrument-makers, nautical pilots and shipbuilders to advance navigational science. Although the existence of a "Sagres school" has been repeatedly debunked by historians, the legend nonetheless persists.

There is no such school mentioned in Gomes Eanes de Zurara's chronicle, only the slightest hint in a passage on how Henry spent nights in thought surrounded by foreigners . The first proper insinuation of such a school appears in Duarte Pacheco Pereira (writing around 1508), who stated that Henry had induced a Majorcan cartographer named "Mestre Jacome" ('Master Jacob'), to come to Portugal, where he went on to teach the kind of nautical cartography pioneered by the Majorcan school to a generation of Portuguese mapmakers.. For a long time, historians identified this "Mestre Jacome" as none other than the famed Jehuda Cresques, but this has since been regarded as highly unlikely (if still alive, Cresques would have been in advanced age; Majorca was not short of other great Jewish mapmakers). João de Barros (1552) repeats Pacheco's statement almost verbatim, adding that Mestre Jacome was a master instrument maker.. The English writer Samuel Purchas (1625) took up Barros's statement and asserted bluntly that Henry and Mestre Jacome erected a "Schoole of Marinership" (although not quite locating at Sagres)

Observataryr

"For, said the mariners, this much is clear, that beyond this Cape there is no race of men, nor place of inhabitants: nor is the land less sandy than the deserts of Libya, where there is no water, no tree, no green herb - and the sea so shallow that a whole league from land it is only a fathom deep, while the currents are so terrible that no ship having once passed the Cape, will ever be able to return" (Zurara, p.31)

mentioned by Duarte Pacheco Pereira as "mestre Jacome" of Majorca, For a long time, it was believed this "mestre Jacome" was none other than the famous cartographer Jehuda Cresques, although that is now discounted as highly unlikely.

Two Jewish mathematicians, Mestre Jose and Mestre Rodrigo, who were said to be the geniuses behind two critical instruments - the mariner's astrolabe and the nocturlabe (Nocturlabio)

Nocturlabio: to determine by how much the North Star was above or below the Pole, the time fo night

Astrolabe: the height of the stars.

Nautical charts were another important innovation. Geographic maps were known at the time, but not very useful for navigation as their meridians collected at the poles. That meant that the direction of a ship had to cut all the meridians at the same angle, which was only possible if it was a curved line. But a curved line is of no use in determining the direction a ship should set. Henry's geographers came up with 'planar maps' with the meridians set out at straight and parallel lines, and thus the routes could be tracked by straight lines that would cut the meridians properly. Of course, that requires the supposition that the sea was a flat surface, and not take into account the reduction of longitude degrees the further away one leaves the equator. This remained a peristent and diffiult error.

Major says Henry created the chair of mathematics at he University of Coimbra (then in Lisbon) in 12 October, 1431. Gave the university several houses he had purchased froma certain Joao Anne, armorer of the king, for 400 old crowsn. By 1435 a chair was known.

---

Travels of Peter, half-fantastic.

Viagems do Infante

Gomes de Santo Estêvão, Historia del Infante Don Pedro de Portugal, el qual anduvo las siete partidas del Mundo, first published 1622 in Salamanca. First Portuguese translation, 1664. Spanish 1704 edition, Libro del infante don Pedro de Portugal, el qual anduvo las siete partidas del mundo, 1704 edition, Gerona: Oliva online

Left Easter, 1416, to Valladolid, to visit his uncle, King of Castile. Also gave him translator Garcia Ramirez.

[Probably false:] Proceeded to Palestine, to visit the sites in the Holy Land, then to the court of the great Turk and then the great sultan of Babylon, where he was well-received.

From there he proceeded to Rome, where he was received by Pope Martin V. (apparently Peter was instrumental in securing, by the bull of 16 June 1428, the right of solemn unction of the Kings of Portugal, as customary in England and France.)

Peter also visited the courts of the kings of Hungary and Denmark. He is said to have accompanied Eric X of Denmark in the service of Emperor Sigismund against the Turks, and then against the Venetians, for which he was apparently rewarded with the March of Treviso. (there is a donation document in 1419 issued from the Council of Constance, but there is some doubt if Peter even left Portugal before 1420.)

With the peace between Sigismund and Venice, Peter proceeded to the Venetian republic, where he received a copy of the travels of Marco Polo, as well as a map (a copy of one originally drafted by Marco Polo himself).

Desirious to see his mother's country, Peter travelled to England, where he was received by his cousin Henry VI. On April 22, 1427, he was elected a Knight of the Garter (replacing the late Thomas Beaufort, Earl of Essex, who had died in late 1426)

After his twelve year sojourn, in 1428, he returned to Portugal, where he was henceforth called the Peter of the Seven Parts"

There is only one narrative record of the journey, written by Gomes de Santo Estevao.

No knowledge of this Venetian map. Antonio Galvao says it was a mappa mundi, with depictions (probably fantastic) of the African promontory.

Disaster of Tangier

Main article: Battle of Tangier (1437)

In 1436, Henry threw himself into a new project - a Portuguese expedition to conquer the north African citadels of Tangier, Ksar es-Seghir and Asilah from Marinid Morocco. Holding Ceuta was proving expensive to the Portuguese crown, and there were repeated calls in the Portuguese court to abandon it. But Henry instead urged an expansion of Portuguese holdings in Morocco. The project had originally proposed by Henry to his father back in 1432, and then again to his brother Edward of Portugal in 1434-35. But Henry's other brothers, Peter of Coimbra and John of Reguengos and half-brother Afonso of Barcelos had argued strenuously against it, urging the king to focus on domestic priorities instead. Nonetheless, Henry eventually secured the support of his youngest brother Ferdinand the Saint and his sister-in-law, the queen Eleanor of Aragon. Henry finally prevailed upon the reluctant King Edward by writing out a will in March 1436, appointing Edward's fiefless second son, Infante Ferdinand, as heir to his seigneural titles and properties (Henry, a lifelong bachelor, had no sons of his own.)

In April, 1436, King Edward of Portugal submitted Henry's proposal to the Portuguese Cortes assembled at Evora. Although the Cortes voiced strong opposition to the enterprise, they nonetheless voted a modest subsidy for it. Although the project now seemed inevitable, Peter of Coimbra, John of Reguengos and Afonso of Barcelos went out of their way to register their votes against it, and restated their opposition to the project.

Through 1436, Henry had strenuously lobbied Pope Eugenius IV, and, in September 1436, the pope issued the bull Rex Regnum blessing the Tangiers enterprise and, more controversially, Romanus Pontifex recognizing the Portuguese 'right of conquest' over the Canary Islands. Henry's pretensions to the Canaries shocked the Castilian prelate Alfonso de Cartagena, Bishop of Burgos, then attending the Council of Basel. Cartagena presented the pope with a mountain of legal evidence proving the Castilian claim on the Canaries. Recognizing Henry had misled him, Pope Eugenius IV issued a new bull Romani Pontifis that very November, withdrawing the previous bull's provisions and clarifying that all the Canary islands belonged to Castile. But Cartagena was not done. Eager to castigate Henry for his impertinence, the Castilian diplomat went further - asserting Castilian right of conquest over Morocco, demanding Ceuta be handed over to Castile, urging the pope to fold the Portuguese military orders back under their Castilian grand masters, and so on. Although Cartagena was probably only half-serious, seeking merely to rattle the impetuous Henry, the sudden surge of Castilian claims nearly sunk the Tangier expedition and brought up the prospect of war between the kingdoms of Portugal and Castile. The diplomatic crisis gradually wound down by the Summer of 1437.

Edward appointed Henry as the commander in chief of the Portuguese expeditionary force that finally set out in August 1437. The unpopularity of the expedition and the difficulties in finding transports ensured that only about half of the expected levies showed up - only some 6,000-7,000 troops, out of an expected 14,000. This was only the first of several things to go wrong. Arriving in Ceuta, Henry found the road to his first objective, Ksar es-Seghir, efficiently blocked. As a result he decided to personally lead the bulk of the infantry overland and lay siege to the citadel of Tangier in mid-September. The first couple of assaults ordered by Henry failed miserably - the Portuguese troops found their ladders were too few and too short and the Portuguese cannon was too weak to make any damage to the walls. The long delay to make up for these deficiencies allowed relief armies from all over Morocco, called by the strongman Abu Zakariya Yahya al-Wattasi of Fez, to converge on Tangier.

In early October, the Moroccan relief army led by Abu Zakariya finally arrived and encircled the Portuguese siege camp. Heavily outnumbered and lacking supplies, the Portuguese expeditionary force held out for only a week, before being starved into submission. In the resulting peace treaty, signed October 17, 1437 by Henry, the Marinids agreed to allow the Portuguese army to depart unmolested, but they were to leave behind all their arms and equipment, taking nothing but the clothes on their backs. In the most critical part of the treaty, Henry agreed to surrender Ceuta to the Marinids, and handed over his younger brother, Ferdinand the Saint Prince, as a hostage to the Moroccans, until the handover of the citadel.

The fiasco of the Tangier expedition - a project personally conceived, promoted and led by Henry - was a serious setback to Henry's reputation. Rather than report the defeat to Portugal, Henry set sail from Tangier directly to Ceuta, where he barricaded himself in his lodgings for weeks, with hardly a word to anyone, evidently in a deep depression. But the question of the treaty now gripped Portugal. Peter of Coimbra and John of Reguengos urged the fulfillment of the treaty and the immediate evacuation of Ceuta. But their older brother, King Edward of Portugal, was gripped by indecision. Henry (still in Ceuta) at length roused himself to write to the king, urging him to reject the treaty and proposing alternative schemes to secure young Ferdinand's release. But Edward also received letters from the captive Ferdinand, explaining the Marinids would not accept anything else, and wondering why the treaty had not yet been fulfilled.

In January 1438, Edward assembled the Portuguese Cortes in Leiria for consultation (Henry did not attend). There, Edward directly laid the blame for the disaster on Henry incompetence. The clerics and burghers in the Cortes urged the fulfillment of the treaty, but the noble magnates (rallied by half-nephew Ferdinand of Arraiolos, who had served alongside Henry in Tangier) urged the king against it. The Cortes was dissolved without a decision being made.

In June 1438, no longer able to resist his brother's summons, Henry finally left Ceuta and returned to Portugal, although he requested exemption from presenting himself in the king's court. Edward set out for a private meeting with Henry in Portel. The decision to renege on the treaty and hold on to Ceuta was definitively made then.

Ferdinand the Saint Prince would die in Moroccan captivity in 1443. In the aftermath of his death, Henry commissioned Frei João Álvares, to write an account of the prince's captivity, intended as a Christian hagiography, to promote the cult of the saint prince. Henry encouraged the popular notion that Ferdinand had died a willing martyr for Portugal's overseas mission. But the view held in many quarters at the time was that Ferdinand was a victim of Henry's military pretensions, blunders and betrayal.

Regency Crisis

King Edward of Portugal died prematurely in August 1438 - of the plague (said his doctors), of heartbreak over the fate of hapless Ferdinand (said popular lore). The kingdom was inherited by his young son, King Afonso V of Portugal. It was generally assumed that Edward's brothers would take up the regency of the realm for the young king, but in his will, Edward of Portugal surprisingly appointed his unpopular foreign wife, the queen Eleanor of Aragon, as regent. This provoked a political crisis. A popular uprising followed, and John of Reguengos assembled a burgher-packed Cortes in Lisbon, which promptly elected Peter of Coimbra as regent. But the Portuguese nobility, led by half-brother Afonso of Barcelos, rejected the move, and urged Eleanor to hold fast.

The kingdom seemed to be careening towards civil war, when Henry the Navigator suddenly stepped in and offered to arbitrate between the parties. At length, Henry negotiated a complicated and tense power-sharing arrangment between Peter, Eleanor and Afonso. Although Henry probably saved the kingdom from war, his role did not much help his popular reputation. The burghers of the realm felt they had the upper hand and, if not for Henry's interference, would have seen off Eleanor and her noble clique. Far from shaking off the stain of Tangier, Henry's involvement in the regency crisis furthered the popular perception of Henry as something of a dynastic traitor, willing to betray his brothers for his personal gain.

Nonetheless, Henry's role was rewarded by the new regents with the personal grant (in July 1439) of the islands of the Azores to Henry. Henry promptly passed the Azores as a captaincy to Frei Gonçalo Velho Cabral, who established the first colony on Santa Maria Island around that same time.

Expeditions Resumed

The Tangier and regency matters settled, Henry resumed the expeditions down the African coast (which had been interrupted since 1436) by dispatching two ships under household knights in 1441 - one under Antão Gonçalves, on a commercial mission to hunt monk seals around Rio do Ouro and bring back furs and oil, another under Nuno Tristão with the exploratory mission of sailing past Pedra da Galé (the last point reached by Baldaia in 1436).

A lateen-rigged caravel

This is the maiden trip of the caravel (caravela latina), a new lateen-rigged, two-mast shallow-draft ship, recently developed by Henry.

Antão Gonçalves, completing the seal hunt around Rio do Ouro, decided to do a little freelance exploring on his own. Going ashore at Porto do Cavaleiro (prob. Point Corveiro), Gonçalves found and captured a solitary young camel-driver, the first person encountered by Henry's captains. Gonçalves, soon joined by Nuno Tristão, were directed by the camel-boy to a small poor fishing camp in the area, where they ambushed and captured some ten natives. Gonçalves returned back to Portugal with the captives, while Nuno Tristão, adhering to his separate instructions, sailed on a little further, past the old 1436 marker, and reached as far as Cabo Branco (Cape Blanc, the Nouadhibou headland in Mauritania), before turning back.

The captives were Muslim Sanhaja Berbers (whom the Portuguese called Azenegues), several of whom promised great ransoms. In 1442, on Henry's instructions, Antão Gonçalves returned to the area of Rio do Ouro to ransom some of the previous year's Sanhaja captives with their familiars for gold dust and pagan 'black' slaves (probably of sub-Saharan West African origin) .

The identification of the African captives as Muslims or Pagans prompted Henry to petition the pope about the 'religious' character of his expeditions. Relenting, in December 1442, Pope Eugenius IV issued bull Illius qui se pro divini, granting indulgences to knights of the Order of Christ who went on Henry's expeditions. This cracked the Order's reluctance to serve abroad, and gave Henry's expeditions the character of a crusade.

Arguin Slave Raids, 1444-46

Cape Blanc and the Bay of Arguin

In 1443, Henry sent Nuno Tristão out on another exploratory mission. Surpassing Cape Blanc, Tristão sailed into the Bay of Arguin. The shallow banks in this stretch of Mauritanian coast made the Bay of Arguin attractive fishing grounds, and its shores and islands were dotted by numerous Sanhaja fishing villages, the first permanent settlements encountered by the Henrican expeditions. Tristão captured fourteen Sanhaja fishermen who paddled out curiously to his caravel, then rushed back to Portugal to report his find.

The prospect of easy and lucrative slave-raiding grounds at Arguin whet Portuguese appetites. To secure his title, in October 1443, Henry received from his brother, the regent Peter of Coimbra, letters patent granting him a personal monopoly over all navigation south of Cape Bojador, whether for the purpose of war or trade. Any ship sailing south of it without Henry' license could be confiscated. Peter's letters also granted Henry the royal fifth and customs duties (tenth on imports) normally due to the Portuguese crown, on any African plunder or trade.

[Peter's generosity to Henry reflected some political calculation at home. In 1442, constable John of Reguengos, Peter's favorite brother and main ally, had died quite suddenly, and Peter's regency came under pressure from a growing quarrel with Afonso of Barcelos. By the African grant, Peter probably hoped to cultivate Henry's alliance to counterbalance Afonso.]

Hearing of Arguin, Portuguese merchants and adventurers rushed to apply to Henry for license. There was a veritable cascade of Portuguese expeditions that set out for slave-raids on the Arguin banks in 1444-46. Some were indeed organized and outfitted by Henry; but others were fully private initiatives, with Henry's involvement limited to granting them a license.

Old Customs house of Lagos, Portugal, site of the first African slave market in Europe

The most famous was probably the private consortium of Lagos merchants, headed by Lançarote de Freitas. The company equipped six caravels (one of which was commanded by Gil Eanes) and headed out straight to the Bay of Arguin in the summer of 1444. They raided a cluster of fishing settlements at the south end of Arguin bay - at Nar (Nair island), Tider (Tidra island) and Cerina (Serenni peninsula) - taking some 235 hapless Sanhaja captives in just a few days.

In the meantime, Henry's other captains continue their exploratory work. In 1444/45, Antão Gonçalves, heading a three ship fleet, set off again for the Rio do Ouro, hoping to renew contact with the Berbers he had met earlier. Finding no one, he dropped off one of Henry's squires, João Fernandes, who volunteered to do some overland exploring. Fernandes would venture deep into Mauritania, as far inland as the Trans-Saharan entrepot of Ouadane, before returning to the coast to be picked up the next year (1445/46).

Around that same time, Nuno Tristão, equipped by Henry, set out again on an exploratory mission, pushing south as far as the mouth of the Senegal River, where he saw the Sahara desert finally end and the tree line begin, and the populations change from Sanhaja Berbers (Azenegues) to Wolofs (Jalofos), returning back home to report he had finally discovered the 'Land of the Blacks' (Terra dos Negros).

The greatest leap, probably still within the year (c.1445), was by the old knight, Dinis Dias (or Dinis Fernandes), who undertook an exploratory mission in a ship outfitted by himself, to repay an old debt he had to Henry. Dinis Dias sailed past the Senegal river to discover the great headland of Cabo Verde (Cape Vert), doubled it and sailed into the bay of Bezeguiche (Bay of Dakar) and anchored in briefly at Gorée island (ilha de Bezeguiche), before turning back home to report his findings.

In 1445-46, more expeditions set out to raid the Arguin banks, including a new massive fourteen-ship slaving expedition outfitted by the Lagos consortium of Lançarote de Freitas. The Lagos fleet had been preceded that year to the Arguin banks by the return fleet of Antão Gonçalves (to pick up overland explorer João Fernandes) and by a Lisbon slaving fleet outfitted by Gonçalo Pacheco, treasurer of Casa de Ceuta, under the command of Dinis Eanes de Grã . Yet another slaving fleet had set out from Madeira early that year, but were prevented by poor weather from reaching Arguin - although one of the Madeira captains, Álvaro Fernandes, pushed on alone.

By this time, however, the element of surprise was gone. The prior Portuguese slave-raids had thoroughly devastated the Arguin shores, the Sanhaja residents had fled the settlements to hide in the hinterlands, and few remained to be captured. Some Sanhaja men decided to fight back, and laid ambushes for the slave raiders - most famously, trapping and killing Henry's squire, Gonçalo de Sintra in 1445.

Nonetheless, the paucity of easy captives on the Arguin banks prompted Portuguese slave-raiders to look for new slave hunting grounds. One squadron of Lagos ships decided to try their luck (illicitly) on the Canary Islands - raiding La Palma and La Gomera for Guanche slaves, an action which infuriated Henry, who forced them to go back and return the captives.

More appealing was Dinis Dias's report from Senegal. Finding little at Arguin, Lançarote's fleet decided to set out there. Lançarote sent a launch to explore up the Senegal river, but it didn't get very far (its crew was beaten back by Wolof woodsmen, after they ventured on the river shore and tried to kidnap two children). The Lagos fleet sailed on south, beyond Cape Vert, into Bezeguiche bay, only to find they had been preceded there by a few weeks by another Portuguese slaver, the aforementioned Álvaro Fernandes of Madeira. On his solitary ship, Fernandes had sailed directly into Bezeguiche (famously carving Henry's motto, Talent de bien faire, on a tree trunk on on a tree trunk on Gorée island) and tried to ambush a series of Wolof canoes in Dakar bay. Fernandes's action raised the alert along the Senegalese coast of the hostile intentions of the Portuguese. As a result, when Lançarote's fleet arrived there in the summer of 1446, the Wolofs greeted the Lagos ships with hails of missile fire, and prevented their launches from landing. The Lagos fleet returned to Portugal, their expectations disappointed.

Senegambia barrier, 1446-47

After the fiasco in Bezeguiche bay, Álvaro Fernandes had sailed on south as far as Cabo dos Mastos (Cape Naze), before turning back. Hearing his report, before the end of 1446, Henry sent out his favorite captain, Nuno Tristão on a caravel, with instructions to sail beyond Fernandes's last point. It is uncertain how far Nuno Tristão actually sailed. Tradition states he sailed as far as Rio do Nuno (Nunez River, modern Guinea), a gigantic leap beyond the Cabo dos Mastos. But modern historians suggest Tristão only reached as far as Rio de Barbacins (Saloum River) (just a few miles below Cabo dos Mastos). Venturing on a launch upriver, Nuno Tristão and his crew were ambushed and slaughtered by waiting native canoes bristling with armed warriors (probably Mandinka)

Álvaro Fernandes had gone out again the same year (1446). Proceeding speedily along the coast, Fernandes also tried to enter one of the Senegambia rivers (possibly again in the Saloum delta, or as far south as the Casamance River) where he was also attacked. Nonetheless, they escaped and despite being wounded, Fernandes hobbled on south until the environs of Cape Roxo (where the angle of the west African coast turns abrupty southeast). Fernandes halted the expedition there and returned to Portugal.

In 1447, a new large Lagos slaving fleet set out, intending to go for the Senegambia. The leader of the expedition, Gil Eanes, was forced to return half-way, but the rest of the expedition, now under Fernão Vilarinho and Estêvão Afonso, continued on. Sailing past Cape Vert, it is believed they reached as far as the estuary of the Gambia River, where one of the ships ran aground (probably around Barra point). The stranded Portuguese crew was immediately attacked by the Mandinka/Niominka, and several of them killed, before being extracted by the other ships. The expedition hurried back to Portugal, stopping briefly in Arguin to buy slaves.

Still in 1447, Henry dispatched a final ship, with the explicit diplomatic mission of making peace and opening relations with "the king of Cape Verde". He placed the command of the embassy under a certain 'Valarte', a Danish nobleman on visit to Portugal, who was possessed by curiosity to visit these new lands. The expedition ended poorly. Going ashore probably in the Sine-Saloum delta, Valarte and his landing crew were ambushed by the local Serer - several of them killed, others taken the prisoner. The caravel, with its remaining crew, returned to Portugal.

Henry suspended further exploratory expeditions in 1447 - too many casualties. too dangerous. In all, eight expeditions had ventured south of Arguin Bay. Of these, four had set out with the objective of sailing beyond Cape Verde. All four were attacked by natives in the Saloum-Gambia region, one completely massacred, two fled back home (one without its captain). The only expedition to actually sail a bit of length was Álvaro Fernandes in 1446, but it was a rather hasty and superficial run. Nonetheless, Fernandes set the furthest Portuguese marker for the next decade: Cape Roxo.

The thoughtless slave raids of Lançarote and Álvaro Fernandes in 1445-46 had put the entire coast below the Senegal River on an alert and hostile footing against the Portuguese. This rendered the area basically impossible to sail - there were no safe watering spots or anchorage points along the coast, except for the uninhabited islands off Cape Vert (Goree, Madeleines). The Saloum-Gambia region in particular had proven a significant barrier for the Portuguese. While African canoes did not typically venture out to sea, the Saloum-Gambia was well-covered by a delta network of rivers. It had become evident to Henry that unless some sort of peace agreement with local rulers was reached, Portuguese ships would not be able anchor safely anywhere along that stretch.

By Zurara's estimate, the Portuguse seized a total of 927 slaves from the African coast during this period.

Arguin: Commercial Phase

Chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara ends his chronicle in 1448, noting that there were not many heroic "feats" therafter worth recording, that Henry suspended the exploratory operations and settled down to trade on the Saharan coast - that affairs in Africa "were henceforth treated more by trafficking and bargaining of merchants than by bravery and toil in arms". Unfortunately,

Faria e Sousa (p.587-8), who attempts to list all the expeditions, nearly throws up his hands, "It does not seem possible so many fleets left in this year, but nonetheless all were spoken of, minus two which were not known at the time" (p.528)</ref> But,

Popular Perception

Popular perception of Henry during his lifetime was probably quite negative. Henry's roles in the Tangiers debacle of 1437, the abandoment and death of Ferdinand in 1443, the regency crisis of 1439 and Alfarorobeira in 1449, could not have endeared him to the common Portuguese population. Indeed, popular feeling in Portugal at the time was probably that Henry was something of a 'dynastic traitor', with a pattern of betraying his his brothers for his personal gain. The Saint Vincent Panels, painted by Nuno Gonçalves around this time, is believed by some art historians to represent such a political statement, a funerary homage to Ferdinand the Saint, exhalting Peter and John while pointing an accusatory finger at Henry.

It was also hard to conceal Henry's appetite for personal enrichment. The Ceuta provisioning scheme, the Madeira and Arguin trade, the slave raids, the trade and manufacturing monopolies, the royal offices secured for his cronies, the alienations of royal property and his embezzlement of the Order of Christ, church tithes, etc. would have all been quite visible. Moreover, Portuguese burghers, bristling at the Braganza regime, were probably quick to notice that Henry's dubious political positions were always amply rewarded economically. Although Zurara suggests there were nobler reasons behind these activities, Henrican captain Diogo Gomes bluntly asserts Henry was driven merely by money, to keep financing his pretentiously large entourage of squires and retainers. Whether or not that is true, Gomes is probably just articulating what was the popular perception of Henry at the time. While a desire for wealth is not unusual for a 15th C. noble prince, Henry went to spectacular lengths for it.

Henry probably sensed his unpopularity, and late in life took steps to clean up and promote his image for posterity.

Despite Zurara's best efforts, it is hard to conceal Henry's relentless appetite for personal enrichment. The Ceuta provisioning scheme, the North African adventures, the slave raids, the trade monopolies, the repeated alienation of royal property, the placement of his lackeys in royal offices, the plundering of the Order of Christ, the embezzlement of church tithes, the profitable "rewards" he extracted for his dubious political poisitions - would all have been quite visible to the general population. Although Zurara asserts there were nobler reasons behind his activities, Diogo Gomes bluntly asserts Henry had only one overriding objective: money to keep financing his large entourage of squires and retainers. Even if Gomes is incorrect, he is nonetheless probably articulating what was simply the popular perception of Henry at the time.

Henry might have been aware of his unpopularity, and it has been suggested that Henry dedicated much effort to clean up and promote his image for posterity. The commissioning of Zurara's chronicle is suggested by some an attempt to monopolize credit for the discoveries, and write out others (notably Peter of Coimbra) who might have had a significant role. Similarly, his commissioning of Alvares's chronicle on Ferdinand was an attempt to divert blame for the Tangiers fiasco and Ferdinand's death away from himself. It is not out of the question that Henry himself might have planted the stories and rumors about his piety and his scientific learning, even though he exhibited little of either during his lifetime. His last will and testament, with its underlining of religion, might not be unusual for a man of the time - but it contrasts with the fact that he did practically nothing for religious institutions during his lifetime.

Zurara's chronicle was not published in his lifetime. Indeed, for the first century after Henry's death, there was no published account or reference to the Henrican era of discoveries, save for the brief memoir of Alvise Cadamosto published in Italy in 1507. It was only in 1552, when João de Barros published his Década da Ásia, that the Portuguese public finally got to read about them. Barros based his work on Zurara's unpublished manuscript, but by 1566, Damião de Góis announced the manuscript was lost. Barros remained the only record until 1839, when a copy of Zurara's chronicle was finally found in the Royal library of Paris.

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